Camp NaNoWriMo and regular old NaNoWriMo have different “rules.” Rules, in these things, are arbitrary anyway, but Camp, specifically, is about setting your own goals and getting there however you’d like. I decided to utilize camp, this year, to finish the third and last book in my still unnamed trilogy. If you remember, last NaNo I worked on the draft for book one before putting it aside to finish Vacancy, so I think this is a nice, full-circle way to complete the drafts.
I was probably (read: definitely) planning too loftily when I thought I’d get done with all three drafts by the 12th of April, and that’s not even accounting for how I’ve been feeling the last 1-2 weeks (awful) which slowed my production down immensely, but here we are, and I’m ready.
I listed Eclipse of the Crown as my project with a goal of 100,000 words. I’ve already got the first 10k words done, but I’m including those in my April counting because my goal is only to finish this draft, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to just update daily with my overall word count than that do all that messy (read: easy but I’m lazy) subtraction. Plus, 100k is a nice number, and I didn’t want to set it at 90k. Yuck.
The NaNoWriMo website, however, has been (in my opinion) a mess recently. I can barely log into it today, the first day of camp, and last month I made several attempts that failed before I was finally able to set up my project. It’s kind of wild to me how bad the site is when they pull in so much moolah, but what do I know about a running a site for other people to use for free?
I do want to show off my makeshift cover though. It’s just for funsies, for getting in the mood. It’s a lot more SeRiOuS than the story within, but I just like dark, gothy, romantic, overdone shit. Sorry, can’t help it!
I’m having more trouble with this draft than I expected. I don’t know if it’s writing burnout (I still have a drive to write and create though), or it’s a fear of being done (but I do want to be done because I really want to get back into book one and edit) or it’s just that I’m in uncharted territory both literally and figuratively (that’s probably it). I’m at a place where I need to do some wrecking of some things I’ve put together nicely, and I’m sort of annoyed with myself for it. But then, that is both what the genre and story in general calls for, so I must. Blah. And also my outline for this book is suuuuuuper weak. I need to devote time to beefing it up and figuring it out, but when I do, I feel guilty for not writing, but how can I write without the plan??? It’s a vicious cycle that I can’t break out of until I do which always just sort of happens. The muse is late.
I guess I’ll just see if 4000 come to me today or not.
A.K. Caggiano 